In another room, two rooms away from the counter where I stood barefoot pressing peas, little Johnny Winter was not yet dead. These peas needed to be pried loose from others, warmed in hot water and carefully pressed, one by one so that the soft squishy split seeds inside pop out intact. Instead, a tablespoon or two of frozen peas already shelled that came bagged in plastic from the supermarket freezer on aisle 12. Not peas fresh from a garden in a green grass field where the sun is shining and the soil is still cool. Not peas lying in a row inside their cocoon of pod, stiff like a row of orphans tucked in their cots in a long narrow hospital room. My thumb and index fingers hovered over the plate and then, like a cormorant or some other seafaring scavenger, quickly dove down to pluck a small bit of pink salmon flesh that I savored before turning on the stove.Īs the kettle heated I was thinking that it was too damn late to be shelling peas. The smell of fish and citrus, lingered in the small kitchen and the round halogen lights over the stove focused on my dinner discards. My white dinner plate that, a few hours ago, held a chunk of broiled salmon, two artichoke hearts and three slices of lemon was sitting on the oatmeal speckled granite between the stove and the sink waiting to be washed. Thinking that the warm, fleshy coral would be a much nicer color on the outside of the fish than grey.
As I stood at the kitchen sink, I was thinking about salmon. I was tired of snow, I was tired of cold and I had turned the thermostat past 70 degrees. I was in the kitchen and still dressed in the same old jeans and faded black turtle neck that I had grabbed out of my closet that morning, standing barefoot on a worn Oriental rug that lay thin on the floor. The snow was piled up against the living room windowed door, where my boots stood like soldiers waiting for combat, ready for action, ready to stomp out the snow. It was 3 degrees outside and the usual street noise was stifled by hour and snow.